Thursday, 16 August 2012

In China's booming smartphone market, which is set this year to overtake the United States as the world's largest, a host of little-known local firms are primed with cheap phones to squeeze market share from U.S. giant Apple Inc's iPhone.

In the latest local challenge to the iPhone, Xiaomi Technology on Thursday launched the successor to its popular MiOne (MI) smartphone. The MI2 has specifications that exceed those of the iPhone 4S and sells for less than half the price.

The second day of the Apple vs. Samsung trial went interesting to say the least. After the court denied Samsung the right to make an argument that a Sony concept was the real inspiration behind iPhone's design, the Koreans decided to take matters into their own hands and released the evidence, which has been previously dismissed by the court.

A render of a mysterious BlackBerry device was "accidentally" leaked on the RIM's developer website. The device apparently is called Dev Alpha B - a successor to the current Dev Alpha device, used to test out the still unofficial BlackBerry 10 OS. The render was quickly pulled down from the site.

A vigilant twitter user by the name of@NerdBoss514went ahead and asked the guys over at @BlackBerryDev on twitter for some info on the mystery device. He got a response that the Dev Alpha B will be an eventual hardware bump to the current Dev Alpha.

ZTE have never been shy about proclaiming their ambitions of being amongst the big names of the smartphone game, and have moved one step closer to their goal this past quarter.

During Q2 of this year, ZTE managed to ship some 8 million smartphones, mostly in their native China. It is estimated that they now hold a global market share of 5.2%, which puts them just behind HTC and Nokia and makes them the 5th largest smartphone supplier in the world.

ZTE have also retained their 4th rank in terms of overall mobile devices sold (which includes smartphones and feature phones), a title they claimed last year. Their goal is to ramp up their annual sales to the 100 million handset mark by 2015.